Multiuser environments such as those found in enterprise computing environments generate very large numbers of electronic documents in sometimes very short intervals. In many such environments, it can be important to save all revisions of a single document, especially when multiple users are collaborating to update the document over time or the document is being shared among multiple users. When storage is not limited in any way, all revisions of the document can be stored permanently in a document store, such as those implemented by traditional document management systems. However, when storage becomes scarce, some (typically older) versions of a document must be deleted and/or the older versions may be moved to backup storage. This process is often a manual one unless the document management system is programmed to delete documents older than some date.
In addition, as more and more revisions are generated, navigating among such revisions to find a particular change in the past may become unwieldy for a user looking to find a particular change to a particular document, or for example, to restore an old version of the document. A user must simply guess at when a particular update was made, for example, by knowing roughly when a change was instituted and then search the revisions created near that date until the update is located.